You Can’t Play a New Media Game By Old Media Rules

If there’s one aspect of the media business that has been disrupted more completely than any other, it’s the whole idea of “breaking news.” Just as television devalued the old front-page newspaper scoop, the web has turned breaking news into something that lasts a matter of minutes — or even seconds — rather than hours. If your business is to break news, your job is becoming harder and harder every day, as legendary Deadline Hollywood blogger Nikki Finke is only the latest to discover. Finke’s company has accused a competing news site of stealing news stories, and seems to be trying to use the “hot news” doctrine of 1918 to bolster its case. But relying on laws from the turn of the century isn’t going to help make the web-based content business any easier, regardless of the merits of Finke’s complaint.

According to the cease-and-desist letter that Finke’s MMC Corp. sent to TheWrap — a blog run by former Washington Post staffer Sharon Waxman — that site has been “engaged in a continuous pattern of misappropriating content from Deadline.com, publishing that information on TheWrap.com, passing off that information as its own.” So far, the only response from TheWrap has been to post the entire letter, and to describe the criticism as “strangely worded,” since it notes that the allegations from Finke’s site don’t actually refer to any specific stories that have been copied or misappropriated. And while Finke criticizes sites that simply call a source to verify Deadline’s stories and then rewrite them, if this is illegal then virtually the entire traditional media industry is in danger of being sued at some point.

To add an extra layer of irony to the whole affair, Waxman herself complained last year about her site’s content being appropriated by Newser.com, the news aggregator run by Michael Wolff — and she sent a cease-and-desist letter making almost identical arguments to the ones that Deadline Hollywood is now making against TheWrap.

This reminds me of an interview I was once at. It was for a local wire service of sorts and their content is paid for by certain other local news outlets so that they can use it on their broadcasts and websites. The interviewer bemoaned the fact that often entities which didn’t pay for their service often “stole” their content (which was all eventually published on the website of one of the major local dailies). He also brought up a site he knew I was involved with, WindyCitizen.com, and said they were “stealing” their content as well. I was awestruck. What do you say to these people? We don’t even speak their language.

Anonymous

Once it’s on the internet, the content is up for grabs.

Anonymous

We can play.. But new social media have little bit changes only i think..Aluminium Kozijnen

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I'm a Toronto-based senior writer at the GigaOm blog network, and this is where I write about online media and other things I come across on the Web. Feel free to leave a comment or use the contact form to send me an email. More info at my Google Profile